The chill of the rain has settled into Beatrix’s bones, and she shivers as she listens to the woman sing a song from another time, a song of hope and resilience and faith. The crowd sings with her, but Beatrix can’t.
The music ends and the spotlights go dark. A hush falls over the crowd, and any hope Beatrix has of finding Oliver washes away with the rain.
September 16, 2202Boston, Massachusetts
Oliver didn’t mean to come to Aevum tonight. He had meant to drink until he forgot, or, at least, couldn’t feel anymore. But the more he chased that numbness, the more lost he felt.
He swore he’d never leave her like that. He has to get back to her.
He can’t get past the damned yellow waiting room. Lucy finds him at the reception desk, searching for a button or a switch or anything to open the door that will lead him to the trans-temporal labs. Back to Beatrix.
“Come with me, Mr. Rhodes.”
Oliver takes a deep breath, his nerves breaking through the haze of alcohol. He’d run, but he’s sure he won’t make it past the elevators. He follows Lucy through the halls to the lab. She sits behind a desk next to a dormant travel station. He sinks into the chair across from her.
“Where are you trying to go?” she asks.
“Woodstock.” It is the next blank page in the journal Beatrix still has. She’ll be there. He knows it.
Lucy types something on her tablet. Oliver straightens in his seat. Is she letting him go?
She slides it across the desk to him. “You’re going to see her, aren’t you?”
Beatrix stares at him from a picture that steals his breath away. The photograph is barely color in the night, all light and contrast. She has a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and her hair is plastered to her head from the rain. Her eyes must have been what drew the photographer: impossibly old and impossibly sad, her broken heart plain for anyone to see. “This was taken on the first night of Woodstock,” Lucy says.
She taps on her screen, and more images slide past. A museum catalog entry for an identification tag belonging to a “B. Lancourt.” The telegramBeatrix sent him about the train she never caught. A blurry black-and-white newspaper clipping of them both dancing in the crowd on VE Day. A photograph in warm color at the Apollo 11 launch.
“I suspected you were up to something since Barnbow,” Lucy says. “But I didn’t know until Lancaut. I’ve never seen someone so desperate to travel. You said, ‘I have to get back,’ but I never sent you there before.” She taps the Woodstock photo with a manicured nail. “You meant you had to get back to her.”
Oliver slumps into his chair, and Lucy takes the tablet from him. He can’t decide if he’d make a terrible spy or if she’d make an exceptional one.
“Who is Beatrix?” she asks.
“She’s no one.”
“You broke into Aevum so you could get back to no one?”
Oliver tries to think through the alcohol, through the pounding in his head, drowning out his thoughts. “She’s a time traveler I meet sometimes when we’re on the same excursion. Is that against the rules?” He hopes it’s not against the rules.
Lucy purses her lips. “Not technically, but we discourage this sort of thing when the travelers are from different agencies. It gets messy. Who is she with?”
“I don’t know,” Oliver says.
Lucy raises an eyebrow. “You’ve been coordinating excursions, and you don’t know who she travels with?”
Oliver shrugs. “It never came up.”
“I would have thought that was the first thing that came up.”
“Well, it didn’t,” Oliver snaps. He should tread lightly. She could call security at any moment. He’s lucky she hasn’t had him hauled off already.
His guts twist. Lucy always plays by the rules. She probably has the fine print memorized. It isn’t luck that’s keeping him here. “Listen, this was a stupid mistake,” he says, rising slowly from his seat. “I’m sorry. I’m going to go.”
“Do you want to spend your last days in a guarded hospital room, Mr. Rhodes?” Lucy asks pointedly.
He sinks back into his chair.
She slides the tablet across the desk again. The report on Beatrix’sfamily tree stares back at him. The one he looked up in the Aevum database.
